WITID 2006

January 16-18, 2006

Workshop Title: 

 

An Introduction to Free/Open Source Software (FOSS)

Presenter(s): 

 

Mohammad Khansari, Jalal Hajiqolamali

Affiliations: 

 

Director of Iran Free/Open Source National Project (Formerly Persian GNU/Linux ),

Senior consultant of Iran Free/Open Source National Project

Overview:

 

The history of FOSS backs to around 20 years ago. During last two decades, FOSS Free software with its unique distributed software development model has gained the interests of many IT users and professional ranging from the ordinary users to developers and policy makers. Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. This type of software freedom has provide the government with many advantages such as vendor independence, security, reliability, reduce reliance of import, and developing local software capacity. Moreover, Free software definition implies special software development, licensing, and business models.

This workshop clear the origins of the FOSS movement and its reasons of spreading around the world. The pros and cons of FOSS and experience of other countries in applying it to their IT systems will be explained. Some well-known FOSS licensing models will be reviewed. The current status of FOSS in Iran will finalize the workshop.

 

Contents:

 

History Free /Open Source Software

Software categories

Why FOSS? FOSS pros and cons

Governments and FOSS

FOSS licensing models

Iran experience in FOSS

Question and answer


 

Period:

Audience:

 

3 Hours

 

Presenter’s Biography:

 

Mohammad Khansari is the director of Persian GNU/Linux Localization National project at Advanced Information and Communication Technology research Center (AICTC) of Sharif University from Jan. 2003 (start of the project). At the same time, he is a PhD candidate and lecturer at Computer Eng. Department at Sharif University of Technology. He has more than 10 years working experience with GNU/Linux. He has two years administration experience with Beowulf architecture, a clustered GNU/Linux system for research in parallel processing. He was also Solaris and Informix database administrator and X Window programmer for more than three years. He and Prof. Dr. Rabiee are the starters of the GNU/Linux localization and National Free/Open source project in Iran at the government level from Jan 2001. He had a short-time research fellowship from DAAD, Germany and some papers in International conference. He has given many lectures on Free/Open source software and GNU/Linux localization topics in Iran and International conferences such as United Nation Expert meeting at Geneva (2004) and FOSS in Syria (2005). He is the co-author of the “Introduction to Free/Open Source Software” in Persian with Prof. Dr. Rabiee.


 Contacts:

Mohammad Khansari, Advanced information and Communication Technology research center of Sharif University

+9821 66165169-72, ext. 129